Toe Tag Parole premiers Monday, August 3rd at 9pm on HBO.

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A: When it is a Life Without Parole (LWOP) sentence.

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While criminal justice reformers, D.C. politicos, President Obama and the like are pressing for change they all too often focus on arguments for the release of non-violent (usually drug) offenders. Releasing that “category” of prisoner though doesn’t deal adequately with mass incarceration or prison overcrowding. We need, as a society, to look at how we treat those who are imprisoned for the longest sentences, how they got their and what we can do as a community to scale back on the vengeance and violence inherent to the prison system.

A literal life sentence is commonly referred to as Life Without Parole or LWOP. Activists tend to use the term Death By Incarceration.

To tell the story of LWOP, the Raymonds found an unusual facility in Los Angeles County, a maximum-security facility in the Mojave Desert. Yard A at California State Prison is the The Progressive Programming Facility — a space that committed LWOP prisoners and the California Department of Corrections forged together. With laws and sentences unlikely to change for those who are deemed the most dangerous, the “most dangerous” went about finding their own solutions.

Yard A — which inmates call The Honor Yard — is a prison yard is free of violence, racial tensions, gang activity and illegal drug and alcohol use. It’s the only type of its kind in the nation. 600 men living in The Progressive Programming Facility and seek self-improvement and spiritual growth through education, art and music therapy, religious services and participation in peer-group sessions.

The press release reads:

Ken Hartman, who beat a man to death at age 19 while drunk, and has been in prison for 36 years, says, “There’s a progression that these things go through. People used to be stoned to death and then they were shot and then they were hung, they were electrocuted. Each step along the way always the argument is made that this is a better kind of death penalty. I’m sentenced to Life Without the Possibility of Parole. It’s not better than the death sentence, because it is the death sentence.”

It promises to be a wonderful film. In an ideal world though, extraordinary efforts by men inside wouldn’t be needed because many of them would be offered the opportunity for improvement and release by the structures of the state.

Statewide Coordinated Action to End Solitary Confinement, Oakland

Two years ago today, the largest prisoner hunger strike in California’s history was started by prisoners in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison. Within the first month of the strike, over 30,000 in California’s prisons had joined, raising the call for the five core demands in unified struggle. The strikers received overwhelming support, with prisoners from across the U.S., in Guantanamo Bay, and as far as Palestine sending statements of solidarity. Outside prison walls, families, loved ones, and organizers elevated the imprisoned voices to an international scale, sparking solidarity actions all over the world, and even prompting the U.N. to call on California to end the use of solitary.

However, the struggle continues. The prison regime has refused to meet the strikers’ demands in any meaningful way, opting to demonize and repress prisoners.

A class action lawsuit brought on behalf of Pelican Bay solitary prisoners in 2012 is ongoing despite numerous attempts by the state to weaken and halt it. Importantly, grassroots organizing has been reinvigorated, with the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition organizing statewide coordinated actions on the 23rd of each month since March of this year to continue raising awareness and building the movement to end solitary, with the actions growing larger across the state.

In the words of Todd Ashker, one of the hunger strike leaders, “I personally believe the prisoncrats’ efforts to turn the global support we have gained for our cause against us will fail […] CDCr rhetoric indicates desperation – a very concerning desperation in the sense that it is demonstrative of CDCr’s top administrators’ intent to continue their culture of dehumanization, torture and other types of abusive policies and practices […] Our key demands remain unresolved. The primary goal is abolishing indefinite SHU and Ad Seg confinement and related torturous conditions.”

Especially in the wake of Riker’s Island scandal and Kalief Browder’s death, the nation is aware of widespread torture — by means of solitary confinement — in U.S. prisons. But, a few years ago the issue was only just beginning to register on the national conscience. It cannot be overstated how vital California prisoners’ efforts (with support from families and allies outside) led the march against this abusive and invisible practice.

Two long and short years … depending on which side of the box you are.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) continues to claim that “there is no ‘solitary confinement’ in California’s prisons and the SHU is not ‘solitary confinement,'” but people inside the Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit say they remain locked in for at least 23 hours per day. Meanwhile, in June 2015, the CDCR released proposed new regulations around its use of the security housing unit and administrative segregation – regulations that may, in part, curb participation in future strikes and other prison protests. […] The regulations are currently going through the required public comment period in which any member of the public, incarcerated or otherwise, can submit written comments. A public hearing is scheduled for August 7, 2015.

Author Todd Ashker, who was locked in the security housing unit at the Pelican Bay State Prison, disagrees with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s assertion that its prisons do not have solitary confinement.

In a 13-page typed statement, Ashker describes how, along with over 1,000 other people, he is locked for 25 years of his life into 11-by-seven-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day. The security housing unit cells have no windows and their doors face a wall so that those inside cannot see each other through the door slot. Any time they are taken out of their cells – for a shower, a visit or an hour of recreation in an exercise cage – they are handcuffed and ankle chained.

“What would it be like to have one’s bodily contact with others reduced to the fastening and unfastening of restraints, punctuated with the most intimate probing of the surface and depths of one’s body?” Ashker writes in his statement.

Solitary still exists and for long as it does, and for as many years tick by, it must be opposed. By us. We.

In the conventional definition of the word, there are not many funny things about prison. In spite of that, those oppressed by the system are still leveraging humour in order to process and overcome America’s dehumanising and oppressive prison industrial complex.

“Poetic Justice Project is California’s only theatre company comprised of formerly incarcerated actors appearing in plays that examine crime, punishment and redemption,” explains PJP whose latest production is INSIDE/OUT: A Comedic Look At Prison and Re-Entry

PRESS RELEASE

Bay Area audiences will witness a unique marriage in June: the happy union of a 500-year-old art form with cutting edge social justice theatre. Poetic Justice Project will present its Commedia Dell’Arte play, INSIDE/OUT, at St. Mary’s Center in Oakland and on Alcatraz Island.

Commedia Dell’Arte is a style of masked, improvisational slapstick comedy that dates back to 16th Century Italy. INSIDE/OUT follows character Damian from prosecution to prison to parole as he wears whatever mask he needs to survive. Damian is saved by the love of a good woman, and by his determination to never return to prison.

The play is directed by Gale McNeeley, a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre and Scuola Internazionale Dell’Attore Comico in Italy. INSIDE/OUT was co-created by McNeeley and actors Leonard Flippen, Jorge Manly Gil, Janet Guess, Nick Homick and Caroline Taylor-Hitch. The actors have all been incarcerated—in prison, jail or juvenile facilities. Most have no previous theatre experience when they come to Poetic Justice Project.

INSIDE/OUT shows Friday, June 19 at 6 p.m. at St. Mary’s Center, 925 Brockhurst St., Oakland. Tickets are $15 and available from Brown Paper Tickets, 800-838-3006, and at the door. On Saturday, June 20 at 2 p.m., there is a free performance on Alcatraz Island.

Based in Santa Maria, the project was founded by Artistic Director Deborah Tobola in 2009. Tobola and Poetic Justice Project recently received the the Santa Barbara County Action Network’s “Looking Forward” Award for Leadership and Vision.

Poetic Justice Project It is a program of the award-winning William James Association, which provides arts instruction to prisoners, people on parole and probation, and youth at risk of incarceration.

THE CORRIDOR

Solutions. Prison reform debate rages around solutions. Even when everyone at a given table agrees on the problem, the propose solutions can differ widely. There are many, they overlap and they are often interdependent.

(For the record, here’s a sampler of my long list of forward steps we could take: Release old and infirm prisoners; sentence children as children, do away with the death penalty, scale back on LWOP (life Without Parole), implement radical and retroactive sentencing reductions for all drugs offenses and non-violent offenses, eradicate solitary confinement, treat addiction with hospitals not prisons, fund services for youth and families to avoid the use of custody later in life, drawdown the bail system, issue an amnesty for outstanding warrants for non-violent misdemeanors, ban the box, make criminal record expungement available as a right, scale back sentencing guidelines to that of the European average, make prisons smaller, provide prisoners nutritious food, subject all staff to yearly self-care and mental health checks, reinstitute Pell Grants for access to college for prisoners, continue all voluntary work programs but provide more than cents on the dollar wages, increase the number of family days and trailer visits, and PROVIDE EDUCATION)

What last solution, what education looks like differs hugely. Some prisoners need parenting classes, some only want practical training (welding, HVAC, electrical, plumbing etc). Other prisoners want business training. Then there are some that want liberal arts college classes.

A staggering number of prisoners need a GED.

The Corridor portrays the nation’s first high school custom built inside an adult jail. The film follows one semester inside the experimental Five Keys Charter School in San Francisco.

In the film, we’ll meet students, teachers and staff. Referred to as the “crown jewel” of the SF Sheriff Department, enrollment in Five Keys Charter School is all but mandatory for incarcerated people who never received a high school diploma.

The problems for mandated GED programs are well known among prison and jail educators — it can be very difficult to engage a class of students with a high school curriculum when they did not respond to high school on the first round. This in-built tension makes any GED project in a prison or jail that more difficult as compared to other programs (with voluntary sign-up). Therefore, Five Keys represents a genuine innovation approaches to criminal justice.

Custodial staff maintain safety in a jail that houses members from a reported 22 active gangs. Meanwhile teachers follow a strict policy of not knowing their students’ criminal charges (in my experience, both common sense and common policy).

The Corridor follows lessons, learning, challenges and graduation in a school that won the 2014 award for best charter school in Northern California.

Filmmakers Annelise Wunderlich and Richard O’Connell began shooting in May 2013 and made over 100 hours of material. It took them over two years to negotiate access. Former Sheriff Michael Hennessey was the man who gave the green-light.

“Hennessey built his reputation on creating programs that go beyond what is mandated by law,” says Wunderlich and O’Connell. “He has said that what he enjoyed most about being the sheriff was to make and experiment with policy. His legacy lives on with the current staff.”

Wunderlich and O’Connell want to create “an immersive portrait that focuses on the inner workings of the school and the programs, capturing along the way conflicts, dilemmas and breakthroughs that arise in the course of carrying out its mission.”

They aren’t trying to make an argument for one type of custodial approach or another. They are interested in observing how education (in this particular case) is shoehorned into a criminal justice system to satisfy some of the system’s objectives — lowered recidivism, empowerment, self-realisation, reductions in violence.

I wish them luck.

Unbelievably, Five Keys has barely been replicated elsewhere. This is despite its measured achievements and despite growing research that education-based jail programs are the most effective way to reduce recidivism.

FILMMAKER’S PRESENTATION

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, Annelise Wunderlich will be speaking next Tuesday, 16th June at Bay Area Video Arts Coalition (BVAC).

“This edition of Storytelling Across Media,” reads the BVAC blurb, “brings together three innovative Bay Area media makers who will speak to the power storytelling holds for those “behind bars”. Although each panelist comes from a different artistic background (performance, documentary film, and fine art photography) they all share a commitment to helping incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals tell their stories and put their voices out in the world, whether through dance, film, or radio.”

Some art and artists abide. Works crop up time and time again. Sometimes it’s as if society has demanded a need for the message; it strikes a chord. Sometimes hype and PR operates to elevate average work above the average median (that’s just how it goes). Sometimes, controversy gets something seen. Sometimes a particular artwork is afforded more attention because of an artist’s prior successes. And sometimes, very occasionally, a piece of art is relevant down through the ages, to all ages, and warrants repeated visits. I saw a Joshua Reynolds at the Legion Of Honor last week. I was captivated. It deserves to be hanging on a wall and still demanding attention 250 years after its paint dried.

Prison-related art is not in the same demand as portraits of rich patrons. Now or in the 17th century. Maybe, then, I am more impressed when a prison-related art project keeps going and going. One such example is Julie Green’s plates painted with the meals of the executed. This is good art and I’d like to share why.

There’s no fixed number of plates and Green plans to continue painting them in memoriam until the U.S. outlaws the death penalty. It goes without saying that every show, just in terms of numbers, is a new show. Also, some venues haven’t enough wall-space for the sheer scope of the project. Green’s The Last Supper: 600 Plates illustrating Final Meals of U.S. Death Row Inmates is currently on show at the Block Museum at Northwestern University until August 2015.

“In fifteen years of the project, this show is unprecedented in terms of planning, installing, engagement, and press,” said Green in an email.

The Last Supper is a project increasing in stature and reputation. Not without discomfort, it does so as more and more people are killed by the state. Needless to say, Green is not a malicious observer of murder. She has rooted The Last Supper in a core activist position; which is to say that she wants to paint herself into obsolescence; she wants to have nothing to push back against. Green wants the injustice of the death penalty gone.

But as the reputation of a piece of art such as The Last Supper grows, so too does the responsibility to deliver perfectly-pitched programming/discussion around each exhibit. When I have curated in the past I have not always succeeded in achieving this — mostly due to scarce time and resources. Great programming often relies on multiple partners and even then it is a mammoth task. For me, fear of not delivering grows proportionately with the responsibility toward, regional and reflexive exhibition programming. Green has named many individuals key to the Block Museum show — she, like most of us, has managed more when assisted by, and in the assistance of, others.

This post isn’t really a reflection on The Last Supper as it is a reflection on what it means when an abolitionist work, or a work with stated political goals, or a anti-prison artwork assumes a momentum that is rapid and big — a momentum characteristic more of the art world than that of the political-activist world.

How an artist responds to such momentum will differ dependent on experience, advise and, yup, the partner(s). Some makers are better at maintaining strong authorial control over their projects. Others are newer to the grooves along which art and art promotion move, and they might be persuaded toward changed elements of the work.

Working with others will almost always increase the audience and the amplification of the message but it’s something that must be exercised consciously. What mouthpieces are in use? Who’s ears are listening? The last thing I want to suggest is that artists with political message should shy away from partnership. Merely, that partnership brings different institutional biographies and political legacies to the fray. Art and politics cannot exist in separate silos and so when art emerges from a political need it must stay true to that need and struggle.

There are structural forces at work in the art world. Makers need to carry out due diligence to ensure that the politics of their patrons and sponsors are in line with their own. Audiences need to know that occasionally work rears up because of partners’ involvement or championing and not because of an inherent message in the work or of the artist.

Again this is no comment on Green’s work. In fact the amount of travelling The Last Supper has done is daunting and I cannot imagine how Green has managed the “office” tasks and emails alone — let alone the press, the shipping, the installation details, the admin etc. The Last Supper repeatedly appears at US cultural institutions across the nation because it is good art (here’s what I think of bad art). The Last Supper is good because Green’s act of making is devotional; the simplicity of the concept makes the scope of the project not daunting but, paradoxically, familiar; the artist is passionate in talking about the work. The project is living.

It is living and it is growing.

The Last Supper is only going to get bigger. Big can be beautiful. And it is powerful. As it ships, relocates and appears in different venues, we audiences need to handle its political message as conscientiously as the installers do the porcelain plates. There can be no lack of concentration or complacency. This is life and death.

Everyone keeps telling me it’s going to be alright. Everyone keeps telling me they didn’t understand my work when I began in 2008 but now they do. They understand it because prison reform and criminal justice reform is in the news. They understand it because Orange Is The New Black is on their screens.

Everyone keeps telling me it is going to be okay because politicians and Departments of Corrections are trying to fix the problems. What? Back up. What makes you think that those who built the Prison Industrial Complex are best positioned to reverse its crimes and abuses?

Much has been made about the bipartisan nature of contemporary efforts to end mass incarceration, as everyone from Newt Gingrich and the Koch Brothers to Van Jones and the American Civil Liberties Union, and now even Hillary Clinton, says that the United States needs to reduce the number of people it incarcerates in its own gulag archipelago. If all these people agree, the conventional wisdom goes, surely we can get something done. Are prisons the only thing that can end Washington gridlock?

And it ends:

To paraphrase the poet Gil Scott-Heron, “decarceration will not be incentivized,” decarceration will not be incentivized, decarceration will not be incentivized. Decarceration will not be incentivized.

IN MEMORIAM

Nils Christie, Norwegian sociologist and criminologist, died Wednesday May 27th at the age of 87.

Christie’s great achievement was to detach discussion of prisons solely from discussions of crime and to afix them firmly to conversation about economic inequality and the definitions of behaviour we attach hastily to those outside of our social class.

Christie ushered in the modern prison abolition movement. Activist group Critical Resistance writes:

“Christie challenged the accepted notions of crime and the legitimacy of imprisonment throughout his career. Along with Thomas Mathiesen and Louk Hulsman, Christie was at the forefront of a tendency of European social scientists that pushed prison abolition into mainstream conversation.”

In this very accessible Q&A, Christie explains that someone stealing money or threatening violence inside or outside the family is an unwanted act in both cases, but only in the latter is it defined as “crime” and therefore more likely to be dealt with courts. Transgression has other “solutions” and responses than prosecution. Judicial systems have to be more than merely punishment.

At different times, Churchill, Mandela and Dostoyevsky encouraged scrutiny of a society’s prisons in order to understand a society itself. Christie asked us to go further and scrutinise the level of pain — psychological, physical, medical — induced by a society’s systems of crime control and punishment in order to understand a society’s character. What level of widespread revenge and hurt are American prisons willing to enact under the auspices of “justice”?

Christie’s seminal book Limits To Pain was the most rounded delivery of his ideas. It was translated into 11 languages. You can read it in full online here.

IN EUROPE, IN THE UNITED STATES

Christie was able to stave off, somewhat, the drive toward punitive sentencing and warehousing in his home nation Norway. He and other thinkers in the social sciences had a place at the table.

Unfortunately, the U.S. prison boom was driven by politicians’ fear of losing votes, guards’ fear of losing jobs, and the public’s fear of the ever-present, media-manufactured predator. The Prison Industrial Complex emerged as a result. Christie describes this money-driven brand of American exceptionalism:

It is quite a fantastic situation when those who administer the pain-delivery in our society have such a great say. It’s as if the hangman’s association got together to work for more hanging. We might feel a bit uneasy about this. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a trend in the military industry to turn to law-and-order production. There has been a series of meetings between defence contractors and penal authorities. The US Secretary of Defence addressed them saying: ‘You won the war abroad, now help us win the war at home.’ It is the electronics industry that is most heavily involved wiring prisons, producing electronic bracelets, electric monitoring both inside and outside prisons. It involves lots of industries – construction, food-catering, even telephone companies. The journal of the American Corrections Association is filled with ads to tap this billion-dollar market.